Category Archives: General Preparedness

When we last left off we had finished our prioritization overall. Now it’s time to get some real plans in gear.

Remember, our goal is to have a years worth of sustianability in case we can’t leave the house.

For better or worse, I lied a little when I said that our prioritization was done. The initial part was, sure, but as part of the actual plan you have to consider the relative priority of various preps.

We’ll assume you have the whole shelter thing nailed, and you’re staying in your home. Bugging out is beyond the scope of this exercise.

As an example, water is generally going to be your highest priority. You can’t last without it. You may be blessed with a well, or a river through your back yard, but what happens if that pump fails?

Since water is so incredibly heavy and bulky, it often makes sense to only store a few weeks or months worth and make sure you have methods of procuring and sanitizing additional water.

Food will generally be your next priority. As with water there’s two main components here. Storage and resupply.

Storage for food is straight forward. Start with staples that you eat, then add more variety as budget allows. Don’t forget the herbs and spices…

The nice thing about food is most resupply plans let you live for a year with only six to seven months of storage. If you’re able to hunt, fish, garden, or raise protein at or near home, then you’ll be able to augment your food storage.

So you might still be eating beans and rice from storage, but if it’s accompanied by a nice salad from your garden and a slab of fried fish … awesome. And nowhere near the amount of consumption out of your stores vs your fresh food.

The other area I’ll touch on as an important area is defense. Problem here is that it’s really easy to go overboard here and since we have a limited time window and presumably limited dollars, we must be careful.

So make sure you have a handgun if you don’t already, and a long gun – preferably a semi auto AR-15 or AK-47 style weapon, but a shotgun will do if need be. Have several hundred rounds of both types of ammo onhand at minimum.

If you don’t know how to use those weapons, be sure to add some budget for a training class. Absolute requirement.

Then stop. Don’t go get another couple guns, or cases of ammo, or fancy night sights, etc until you have your other areas squared away.

This is contrary to modern prepping gospel, but I think with the limited time window here, you are better off focusing on other areas once you have some basic defensive preps in place.

Certainly at some point when you have more of your preps in place, you’ll want to add in some more ammo (especially) and maybe another weapon or two. But that’s a secondary priority.

So we left off last time having assessed where we’re at overall in the categories we care about. We even took the chaotic brainstorming results and put them into some sort of reasonable order. Now we need to figure out what our priorities should be. Some of these things are going to be more important… Continue Reading

So here’s the first installment of the ’90 Days Left’ series, where we go over my thoughts on what to do if we know that we’ve got 90 days to finalize preps before something horrible happens. The first thing to do, above all else, is to not panic. Yes, you just got awful news. Yes,… Continue Reading

So I’ve been pretty busy lately and haven’t had time to write too much. And honestly, I haven’t felt the muse either. But today I had an idea for a new series, which I’ll introduce now. Let’s say that you, for whatever reason, knew that you had 90 days to prep for being on your… Continue Reading

One thing I struggle with a fair amount is biting off more than I can possibly chew. I have a big family, bunch of interests, prepping and keeping up with what’s going on in the world, a fairly demanding day job, a couple of side ventures, and there’s just never enough time in the day.… Continue Reading

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but right now is a pretty busy time. We’re doing our own garden planning, getting ready to launch the seed-n-start business locally, plan out the beekeeping stuff for the year, iterate on our house plan to try to reduce costs more so we can afford it, and the… Continue Reading

All too often there’s one parent that catches the ‘Prepping Bug’ and the other parent … doesn’t. If the newly minted prepper is lucky, the spouse will go along with it. For quite a few of you the experience has been a bit different. You’ve gotten reactions along a spectrum of “you want to do… Continue Reading

I’ve often written about how important it is to know where your food comes from. How important it is to grow what you can, to buy locally so you know your provider, and wherever possible source direct from the producer. An article from the BBC this weekend brings this home in a particularly different way.… Continue Reading

Over the weekend there was a story about a bigger than usual flu season that started early and has been hitting more people. So it this a big pandemic? My gut says the answer here is no. One big reason is that the media is covering it. They’re typically on the ball when it’s time… Continue Reading

Most of us are familiar with the concept of normalcy bias. For those of you who aren’t, it’s basically a human nature type thing that makes it very hard for us to accept the fact that what is the norm may not be the norm tomorrow. That since a disaster hasn’t happened to us, it… Continue Reading